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Speakers of different languages remember visual scenes differently

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Re: Speakers of different languages remember visual scenes differently

#81

Post by cachvico »

godelski wrote: post #77
dfawcus wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your simply mentioning the sensation was enough to distinctly bring it to mind. Having grown up by a beach, I've experienced it a lot, from childhood through to as an adult at different beaches around the world. While a specific word for it may be useful, I don't see how it is necessary as an aid to recall of the sensation.

> I don't see how it is necessary as an aid to recall of the sensation. Because the nature of language itself is that of compression. In fact, this is why there are often miscommunications, and significantly more on the internet than with people you know well. Language works kinda like this: Alice has a thought in their head, they compress that thought into words, Bob hears the words and decompresses the words into t…

This is an extremely insightful and profound comment. Thank you

Re: Speakers of different languages remember visual scenes differently

#82

Post by godelski »

Tainnor wrote: post #47
fouc wrote: post #5

Hey, looks like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_hypothesis has finally been proven. Joking :-)

The Sapir-Whorf hypotheses remains contested. IMHO everyone who isn't completely clueless has to agree that the strong version of SW is without merit (language doesn't seem to impose hard limits on our thinking), but those who have seen the evidence (e.g. in the field of spatial recognition) would also be hard pressed to deny that linguistic features do mirror cultural practices and points of view. Of course then the…

Well most people think in words, so very clearly they should have influence on the way we think. Nearly all of us have thought aloud or produced thoughts while thinking. But some 1 in 5 or 1 in 4 people do not have inner speech. It would be hard to argue that speech dictates thoughts if one does not think in words (but this does not exclude influence).

As far as I'm aware, the question isn't about if the weak SW exists, but how much influence language exerts on thoughts. I'd be surprised if it was close to zero but I would also be surprised if it was above 50% (whatever percent means here).

Re: Speakers of different languages remember visual scenes differently

#83

Post by azernik »

gumballindie wrote: post #34
azernik wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally research of this type finds that dual language speakers' remembered details depend on which language they've been primed with (ie made to use or listen to just before the activity). It's also much more subtle than the splashy headlines indicate - it's about which details you're more likely to remember, not some fundamentally different experience of the world.

Details are subjective, and that can be influenced by culture and language. For instance if in my culture it's more important to know the colour of your pants then i will remember that. If in your culture the colour of your hat is more important you will remember that. But a person's culture changes, and that person can still speak a particular language but memories be influenced by a different pattern. Correlation a…

The evidence from dual language speakers (primed language changing the task performance) suggests it is in fact about the language spoken - these are actual controlled experiments.

Small effect sizes and not super interesting effects IMO unless you're doing deep neuroscience stuff on memory and attention, but it's pretty clear language plays a role.

Re: Speakers of different languages remember visual scenes differently

#84

Post by jvanderbot »

dfawcus wrote: post #31
canvascritic wrote: post #3

Man this reminds me of this trip I took to the Maldives as a kid. While spending time with locals, I learned the word "feyli," a term unique to their Dhivehi language. "Feyli" describes the feeling of sand between your toes as waves recede on a beach, a sensation familiar to many but so specific that English doesn't have a singular word for it. Before being introduced to feyli I simply enjoyed beach walks as a sum of…

Your simply mentioning the sensation was enough to distinctly bring it to mind. Having grown up by a beach, I've experienced it a lot, from childhood through to as an adult at different beaches around the world. While a specific word for it may be useful, I don't see how it is necessary as an aid to recall of the sensation.

I think words are a sort of Huffman encoding of information. I can definitely use a sentence to describe something, but you do that enough and it's just nicer to have a word for it.

Re: Speakers of different languages remember visual scenes differently

#86

Post by defrost »

godelski wrote: post #80
wilg wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do languages have limits? I mean, the poster explained the situation in English. How much does terseness matter I wonder?

> Do languages have limits? Yes. Language is itself compression of thoughts. Thoughts themselves are compression of something larger (observations, experiences, combinations of other thoughts, etc). It seems that there is more than one very famous mathematical proof that dictates that systems such as these cannot be complete, or even consistent.

It's a question sorely lacking in a definition of "limit"

> It seems that there is more than one very famous mathematical proof that dictates that systems such as these cannot be complete, or even consistent.

At least three approaches to similar results arising from questions posed by Hilbert - but do these results impose "a (undefined) limit"?

Axiomatic systems that can never be complete or consistent can still be used to reason about objects without limit; both the countable and uncountable numbers spring to mind.

Is an axiomatic system that can never be complete "limited"? Surely there's always something more to add on that asymptotic(?) approach to 'completeness'?

Is it possible that being complete or consistent is a limit, bounded by completeness , unable to discuss the paradoxical?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_problems

Re: Speakers of different languages remember visual scenes differently

#87

Post by robocat »

They are using a spoken word to prime the subject, so the title is highly misleading:

In visual search experiments, participants typically hear a word and find the matching item among an array of object images. Crucially, the other objects in the array can be manipulated to resemble the target item visually or linguistically. For example, when asked to find a beaker among other objects, participants look more at objects whose names overlap (e.g., beetle) or rhyme (e.g., speaker) with the target word than at unrelated objects (e.g., carriage)

Re: Speakers of different languages remember visual scenes differently

#88

Post by numpad0 »

resolutebat wrote: post #76
PunchTornado wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as my old fried Witty used to say, the limits of my language are the limits of my world.

That's the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which has been pretty thoroughly discredited: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

you know, Turing completeness doesn't mean you can actually port arbitrary Turing complete code on another Turing complete environment. You can't transpile x86_64 Linux Kernel image into a bare HTML+CSS file, or random generated and filtered valid sequence of Turing machine tape instructions into a well structured and annotated Rust code.

I believe that is what "languages determine perceptions of the world" in Sapir-Whorf hypothesis means. Not "not all languages are Sapir-Whorf complete, only some are", which is obviously wrong, and also what is probably catching you. All languages on Earth are probably complete, just except that says nothing about modeling paradigms and syntaxes and all sorts of mannerisms shared and not shared among those equal and complete languages.

Re: Speakers of different languages remember visual scenes differently

#89

Post by greiskul »

numpad0 wrote: post #88
resolutebat wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which has been pretty thoroughly discredited: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

you know, Turing completeness doesn't mean you can actually port arbitrary Turing complete code on another Turing complete environment. You can't transpile x86_64 Linux Kernel image into a bare HTML+CSS file, or random generated and filtered valid sequence of Turing machine tape instructions into a well structured and annotated Rust code. I believe that is what "languages determine perceptions of the world" in Sapir-…

> you know, Turing completeness doesn't mean you can actually port arbitrary Turing complete code on another Turing complete environment. You can't transpile x86_64 Linux Kernel image into a bare HTML+CSS file, or random generated and filtered valid sequence of Turing machine tape instructions into a well structured and annotated Rust code.

It depends on how you define things, but in a very reasonable definition it does actually mean that. If we consider a computational model to be a way using a finite string in countable alphabet to represent every single computable function, then yes, there is an algorithm that can take a program in any computational model 1 and find another program in computational model 2 that also implements the same computable function. Implements here means that both programs will for the same input return the same output if they both halt, or both will not halt.

Now the running time, or algorithmic complexity of both algorithms, is not under consideration here. The x86_64 program running in native hardware might finish the computation in milliseconds, where a browser that does the same computation using purely HTML and css that our universal transpiler generated might run in trillions of years.

Re: Speakers of different languages remember visual scenes differently

#90

Post by Lamad123 »

psychphysic wrote: post #44
ethanbond wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think they said it’s necessary. They said it helps to isolate it in consciousness from the countless other phenomena you’re experiencing every second of every day.

Reminds me of mindfulness practices, having a word for it, and linking that word to a trip to the Maldives is likely what makes it so intensely memorable.

Very "intensely memorable" feelings/things don't have names!! The smell of old grass or barnes or rain on dry soil or kinds of breeze at certain temperature and level of humidity.. Many of these random things without names are still there and don't require words.
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